“even the biographical individual is a social category. It can only be defined in a living context together with others; it is this context that shapes its social character and only in this context does an individual life acquire meaning within given social conditions.”

November 25, 2010

Some Speculations on the Demos

This is rough and scattered like all my posts. Just dump the shit online I say.

In all the interesting posts on the Demos against the cuts, ( In particular see IT, Lenin and Federico )I haven’t seen anyone comment on how inexperience relates to several aspects of the recent demos. This is surprising because it seems like its something that might be philosophically addressed in terms of grammars, language games, form/content, learned behaviour etc.

Anyone paying any attention to these Demos already knows how many kids are involved. What hasn’t been discussed is what this means in terms of behaviour at the Demos. People like me who have attended many demos are used to rallies and Demos following a certain predictable procedure: in terms of how we participate, how the police behave, how we interact with the police etc. But from what I’ve seen many of the kids haven’t learned these rules. At least they don’t follow them, which is great, but also slightly frightening. Great because it has opened up so much possibility, potential and exuberance: in what happened at Milibank and in the way the kids just took off in groups from the ending rally at yesterday’s march in Brighton confounding typical rally procedure and the police. (So awesome!) Slightly terrifying, in the way that I have seen scores of them overact to tentative police movement. causing a momentary spasm of pandemonium out of fear of a stomping that could potentially go bad in the wrong circumstances (This of course is different to the many occasions in which the police have overreacted and used unwarranted force on children.)

Can it be surmised from this that the kids who behave in this manner aren’t experienced and haven’t acquired the learned behaviour of demonstrating? If this is so does this represent the development of a new form of political demonstration akin to what Marx touches upon in the 18th Brumaire? (drawing their poetry from the future not the past?) Or is it something that will be colonized and appropriated and suppressed with even more kennels and new techniques developed to counteract spontaneity?